Hi all,
I had a well running installation of Ubuntu-Mate 16.04 on a workstation with 8TB raid / 2 x Nvidia GPU 1070 / 128 GB RAM. When configuring some of the RAM for temporal storage the system crashed and I was unable to recover it.

I thus tried to boot Ubuntu Mate 16.04 from an USB stick and received the error message "NMI watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#X stuck for 10s" with X running from 0 to 7. This message repeats forever. I then tried booting plain Ubuntu 16.04 with the same outcome. Finally, I could boot Ubuntu 14.04 without receiving this message but I want to install again the more recent version.

What might be incompatible between my hardware and ubuntu(-mate) 16.04? How can I install it? What is the reason for this problem? I found some posts on this error message but none was related to the version of Ubuntu installed. I am aware that the Nvidia cards may be involved but when booting from the USB stick no driver is yet installed and still I get the error.....
Thanks for hints, D-E